Sometimes they dream up entertaining ways to showcase their abilities, such as slapping a sticker high on the backboard, grabbing a stuffed animal hanging from the rim with their mouth or blowing out a lit birthday candle that is on the rim as part of the dunk. Innovation: Enjoy itĭunkers can invent new ball movements and introduce never-before-seen variations. Vince Carter performing a powerful 360 windmill dunk in the 2000 NBA Slam Dunk Contest. However, always check whether the dunker pushes off the obstacle while jumping over it because pushing up increases the upward force and, when done properly, will allow them to elevate higher than they are truly able to jump. Jumping over obstacles is impressive because it makes all other parts of the dunk more difficult. This is easier than checking distance between the hips and the floor, because the dunk happens so quickly and jerseys can make it hard to visually locate the hip.ĭistance is simply how far the point of takeoff is from the basket. Flight: Elevation, distance and obstaclesįlight involves how high the dunker jumps, how far they jump and – if they jump over something – the size of an obstacle they jump over.Ī simple way to check how high the dunker jumps is by looking for the highest point of their head relative to the bottom of the net and basket. All these activities are exciting and entertaining, but they do not reflect what the dunker actually does. Jumping over a celebrity is no different from jumping over an ordinary person of the same height. Disregard things that are not part of the actual dunkīe careful of theatrics such as singing choirs, clever passes from a teammate, changing jerseys and other features that do not meaningfully alter how the dunker executes ball movements and body actions. Turns out Kadour and Damian had devised a system to classify dunks that was very much like the one Evans and I published in 2019.Īs our association continues to work on new and better ways to enable judges – and the general public – to score dunks, here are five things to keep in mind whenever you watch a slam dunk contest. My pursuit led me to the World Dunk Association, which was started in 2020 by Kadour Ziani, a retired professional dunker, and Damian Le Nouaille-Diez, a software engineer, author and entrepreneur. The influence of non-dunk-related factors made me want to discover new methods to judge and score slam dunks. Slam dunks are an impressive feat in basketball. But a player’s popularity is often based on the player’s skill, so we don’t know if player popularity is a cause of – or simply correlated with – scoring high on a slam dunk. Other factors included the player’s popularity – as measured by the number of mentions in the media. When a dunker’s team or hometown hosted the contest, their dunks were often scored higher than they would have been if the contest were held somewhere else. We found about 28% of a dunker’s score is based on factors that have nothing to do with the actual dunk, such as whether or not the contest took place in the hometown of the dunker or the dunker’s team. Only about 45% of a player’s dunk score is based on what they do with their body or the ball, our analysis found. As of February 2022, the database contains information on more than 700 dunks. I created a database to capture data from every dunk I could find for contests going all the way back to 1984. Image captured from the NBATV broadcast of 1987 NBA Slam Dunk Contest. As chairman of the technical committee for the World Dunk Association – a group formed in 2020 to build more appreciation for the slam dunk – I also look to improve upon a new system we have developed offering a more scientific approach toward how judges score slam dunks. 18, 2023 – I don’t watch just to be entertained. So whenever I watch the NBA’s annual slam dunk contest – like the one that Philadelphia 76ers’ Mac McClung won with a turnaround slam on Feb. I study dunks, so that makes me a dunk scientist. Today, my fondness for dunking remains, but on a much higher plane. Despite the injury, I was just in awe that he had dunked the ball. The impact ripped open his finger and he began to bleed. Even though he was exhausted from a day of construction work, he dunked it hard, all his limbs outstretched. One day my dad and I were shooting baskets with a volleyball.
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